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Calling out sick should not require a workplace showdown, especially while battling a high fever and undiagnosed bronchitis.

At a government office in Karachi, one employee notified the group chat he was too ill to work and received an all-caps refusal.

Instead of accepting the intimidation, he publicly clarified that he was informing management, not requesting permission to be sick.

Let’s see how this confrontation played out.

Officer refusing sick leave

I work at a Government Office, NADRA, in Karachi, Pakistan.

I work night shifts, and it is great there.

For a couple of weeks, I was feeling under the weather, not knowing I had bronchitis.

One week, I was too sick to come to the office.

But when he requested time off, it didn’t go so smoothly.

We have a WhatsApp group where we inform each other of the ongoings and whatnot.

The Shift Incharge was himself on sick leave, admitted to a hospital for unknown reasons.

He had left a senior approval officer in charge of the night shift.

When I was new on the night shift, everybody had praised the guy for being friendly and stuff.

However, this didn’t prove to be the case.

He actually was friendly until he was assigned to be additional in charge.

I had dropped a message in the group chat that I would not come due to sickness.

He replied with, “NOT ALLOWED!” in all caps.

So the employee decided to boldly fire back.

I was not myself due to a high fever, and it was well over two hours before the shift started.

So, I replied an hour later, taking offense at his tone in the reply.

I wrote to him that I was not asking for leave, I was informing him, and that he could do whatever he wanted with that information.

He wasn’t letting this guy off the hook.

Right there in the group chat were the Office Incharge and Shift Incharge, and they definitely read our back-and-forth.

I was absolutely roasting him in my grammatically perfect English against his broken English. (Good English is a flex among us native Urdu speakers.)

Luckily, everything turned out well for the employee in the end.

The next day, I was told that he had marked me absent and wanted to punish me.

I confronted him in the morning when OIC clocked in.

The OIC took my side and had the transfer order canceled that the approval officer had issued, and insulted him in front of me.

Sick leave should be a right, not a privilege.

What did Reddit think?

It’s a great day when the employee wins over a tyrannical boss.

The best kind of revenge is petty.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who got the perfect revenge after being told he can’t work from home.

This employee really showed his boss.

After the approval officer marked him absent and issued a transfer order, OP confronted him the next morning with the office supervisor present.

The supervisor sided with OP, canceled the transfer, and publicly scolded the temporary boss for wildly overstepping his authority.

The officer borrowed one night of power and immediately spent the entire balance on an all-caps ego trip with overdraft fees.